Mama to five frozen teens.
Married to the Mister.
Writing - Meditating - Reading - Senior Dog Doting - Sober Living - are my jam.
Life is good.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Fourteen

My baby girl turned 14 this past week.

14.

It is very hard for me to put my love and adoration for my girl into words without sounding cheesy or insincere. So, I'm just going to jump into her birthday :)

For the past year and a half, Hatfield has taken to wearing mis-matched flip flops. I believe it started after we saw Wicked, when she started wearing one green and one pink flip flop. It has since evolved and given that she has about a zillion pairs of flip flops, she has a near infinite number of combinations.

(Side note: it looks very cute and charming on my 14-year old daughter. I, however, share the same shoe size as Hatfield, and I must confess that mismatched flip flops on a 37-year old Mom? Not very charming.)

So, what better than a MisMatched Flip Flop cake to start off her birthday?

Our girl may be a teenager who looks great in a cowgirl sunhat, but she still has enough of a kid side to want to hit Bay Beach Amusement Park on her birthday for some Scrambler, Tilt-a-Whirl, Scat and Zippin' Pippin' action.

Plus, at 14, she's past the "I'm too old to ride the kiddie train" and into the "I'm old enough to be riding the train with my little sis because I'm an awesome big sister" sort of cool.

(Although, as a mother, I LOVE the fact that she LOVES the Harry Potter '07 shirt that the Mister brought home for her from Universal Studios last week.)

Hatfield is a wonderful daughter, great big sister and, for lack of more inventive vocabulary, a really neat person.

Hatfield is the type of girl who takes her papillon kayaking.
That is definitely something only done by a neat person :)

I still can't believe that she is 14. Where did the years go?

Back when my girl was a wee tot, the thought of having a teenager would leave me hyperventilating and panicked.

But here we are: 14. 2 more years until driving. 4 more until 18. 5 until college (Hatfield will turn 19 the summer she graduates high school.)

No hyperventilating here.

Instead, I'm excited. I'm so excited to see how my girl is maturing and growing. I'm excited by just how many opportunities she has before her. She's an accomplished pianist, an amazing dancer, a solid athlete, a creative artist, an animal lover, and an aspiring author.

(Hatfield took this photo during last week's Strawberry Picking)

I'm proud of how many opportunities she is willing to take, even if they are scary at first.

This summer, we signed her up for U-15 soccer (girls, ages 12, 13 & 14.) We arrive to the first practice to find out they have 27 girls and 1 coach, which meant that she'd be lucky if she could get on the field for even 40% of a game.

However, they asked the girls to consider bumping up to U-19 (girls, ages 15, 16, 17 & 18), because that team was short on players.

Hatfield went. She was a bit worried at first, but we had a great talk about opportunity and how sometimes, we grow the most as people when we are willing to step outside of our comfort zone.

So she went for it. All the girls play high school soccer, which is way more aggressive than the middle school level, but she jumped right in. And she's doing great. She's had two goal attempts (both sailed over the net), but she's holding her own really well, and you'd never know she was the youngest on the team.

Well, you could probably figure it out if you realized that most of the girls drive themselves to the games, whereas she gets dropped off in Mom's (ad)Venture.

(Okay, that makes me hyperventilate a little bit. But not too much. ;-)

Hatfield has been one of the absolute greatest joys of our lives. If I could, I would happily spend these 14 years over again, just to experience her childhood all over again.

(Hatfield and BCFD's Advanced Line Lyrical Performance.)

I LOVED this costume. You can see a bit of the top in this photo.

The girls looked like woodland faeries floating across the stage.)

We love you, Hattie Lou! We can't wait to see all the wonderful things life has in store for you!

The 5FC Crew

About Me

5 kids, 2 dogs, 3 cats, and I'll pass on the partridge in the pear tree for now, thanks (although I'd take a pear tree.) We survived our 30 month long Haitian adoption process, and now I just try to live life in the moment, whether it's homeschooling, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, refereeing, bandaging ouchies, giving hugs, vacuuming, doling out kisses, picking up play-dough, or attempting to keep up on the blog. My Mister is a legalized drug pusher, saving the local population from the horrors of herpes and prostrate problems. We put up with the burbs for now, but would one day like to live in the country, where I can raise alpacas, the girls can train dogs, our boys can be boys, and Mr. C. can work on project cars (waaayy out of sight in the far back of the yard) to his heart's content!